Origins of belief in hell
The Christian belief in hell has
developed over the centuries, influenced by Jewish and Greek ideas of the
afterlife.
The earliest parts of the Hebrew
Bible, around the eighth century B.C., described the afterlife as Sheol, a
shadowy, silent pit where the souls of all the dead lingered in a minimal state
of silent existence, forever outside of the presence of God. By the sixth
century B.C., Sheol was increasingly viewed as a temporary place where all the
departed awaited a bodily resurrection. The righteous would then dwell in the
presence of God, and the wicked would suffer in the fiery torment that came to
be called “Gehenna,” described as a cursed place of fire and smoke.
Early depictions of the afterlife
in ancient Greece, an underworld realm called “Hades,” are similar. There, the
listless spirits of the dead lingered in an underground twilight existence,
ruled by the god of the dead. Evildoers suffered gloomy imprisonment on an even
deeper level called “Tartarus.”
Beginning in the fourth century
B.C., after the Greek King Alexander the Great conquered Judea, elements of
Greek culture began to influence Jewish religious thought. By time of the first
gospels, between 65 and 85 A.D., Jesus refers to the Jewish belief in the
eternal fire of Gehenna. Elsewhere, he mentions evildoers’ banishment from the
kingdom of God, and the “blazing furnace” where the wicked would suffer sorrow
and despair and “where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.” Jesus also
mentions the Greek Hades when describing how the forces of evil – “the gates of
Hades” – would not prevail against the church.
Medieval ideas of hell
In early Christianity, the fate
of those in hell was described in different ways. Some theologians taught that
eventually all evil human beings and even Satan himself would be restored to
unity with God. Other teachers held that hell was an “intermediate state,”
where some souls would be purified and others annihilated.
The image that dominated in
antiquity eventually prevailed. Hell was where the souls of the damned suffered
torturous and unending punishment. Even after the resurrection of the dead at
the end of the world, the wicked would be sent back to Hell for eternity.
By the beginning of the fifth
century, this doctrine was taught throughout western Christianity. It was
reaffirmed officially by popes and councils throughout the Middle Ages.
Medieval theologians continued to
stress that the worst of all these torments would be eternal separation from
God, the “poena damni.” Medieval visions of the afterlife provided more
explicit details: pits full of dark flames, terrible cries, gagging stench, and
rivers of boiling water filled with serpents.
Perhaps the most fulsome
description of hell was offered by the Italian poet Dante at the beginning of
the 14th century in the first section of his “Divine Comedy.” Here the souls of
the damned are punished with tortures matching their sins. Gluttons lie in
freezing pools of garbage, while murderers thrash in a river of boiling blood.
Today, these images seem to be
part of a past that the 21st century has outgrown. However, the official
textbook of Catholic Christianity, the “Catechism of the Catholic Church,”
reaffirms the Catholic belief in the eternal nature of hell. It omits the gory
details found in earlier attempts to describe the hellish experience but
restates that the chief pain of hell is eternal separation from God.
The Vatican insisted that the
pope was misquoted by the journalist. But theologians have pointed out that
Pope Francis has stressed the reality of hell several times in recent years.
Indeed, for today’s Catholics at least, hell still means the hopeless anguish
of God’s absence.
